Teacher Jennifer Parkes speaks animatedly about her experience as a teacher. - Dennis Coke
By Leonardo Blair,
Freelance Writer
JENNIFER PARKES felt that there was something else out there for her after spending 14 years inside the classroom. So she packed her bags and walked away.
But after three years, the teacher in her would not keep still. Parkes returned to the classroom in 1996 and she doesn't believe she will leave again.
"Once a teacher, always a teacher," she said as she began her story.
"I realised that I really missed teaching...I came home sometimes and I looked at my kids and I would be asking them about their (school) work and they would say 'mommy! give me a break cause ah just coming from class, please give me a break!'" she said with a girlish laugh.
The charismatic educator, who teaches grade six students at the Excelsior Primary School said she had no idea she would have developed such an attachment to teaching.
"I wanted to be a soldier then, believe me! And I don't mean in the office either. Ah mean like going out on the road and that kind of thing but then, my teachers believed that I was suited for something else a teacher," she beamed.
And her teachers were right. Parkes showed she had the mettle for teacher training when she became the only person from her grade at the Kingston Secondary School to pass the entrance test for the diploma programme at Shortwood Teacher's College. She spent three years at the institution specialising in remedial reading. After Shortwood she began teaching at St. Benedict's in Seven Miles, Bull Bay where she remained for 14 years.
Parkes admits that when she first started teaching professionally at St. Benedict's she wasn't sure she could do the job.
"I said wow, this is not for me because I don't think I can teach a grade one class. It was a revelation ah can tell yuh. Because I didn't know I could do some things until I reach in grade one. For instance, you're teaching something and you need your aids, you have to draw your aids and you have to make it look like what it should be because those children are going to say to you, 'Miss! What is that Miss? I don't know anything look like that!' so gradually yuh start learning to draw and you say this is you ... ," she said.
She says if there is anything she has learnt during her years of teaching it would have to be patience.
"These children are even more mature at a younger age than then, they will say things to you that you never expected and you have to be in a frame of mind so you can deal with it," said Parkes.
She relates a situation between herself and one student she taught at St. Benedict's.
"There was this little boy who would sleep in the class every day and one day, my husband, who was a soldier then, came to school and the little boy saw him and he ran fast and jumped over the fence and went straight home."
The following day when the boy came back to school he explained that he was afraid of Parkes' husband because his mother smoked ganja. It also turned out that the boy was also a regular smoker of the weed which explained his drowsiness in class.
She says her students know her as a disciplinarian who doesn't joke around when its time to work, which will always involve some sort of reading.
"In everything I do, the reading comes out," she said.
The optimistic educator believes that, even though the situation in the classroom is getting better, there is always room for improvement.
"I think that we have too many students in one class. The Ministry of Education and the JTA, they have worked on a figure now and they have said that this coming September, it will stand at 35, because right now it is supposed to be 42 but you find that most times it is more than that," she said.
She advises teachers in the profession both old and new, to get to know their students as this will make their teaching more effective.
"You can't teach the child and don't know what is happening to the child. You have to know what is bothering this child, why the child is not learning. Maybe the child is not going to say anything to you but you should know what is really wrong," she said.
